Saturday, December 26, 2015

The Original PositionEd. by Timothy HintonCambridge University Press (2015)292 pagesDescriptionAt the centre of John Rawls's political philosophy is one of the most influential thought experiments of the twentieth century: which principles of justice would a group of individuals choose to regulate their society if they were deprived of any information about themselves that might bias their choice? In this collection of new essays, leading political philosophers examine the ramifications and continued relevance of Rawls's idea. Their chapters explore topics including the place of the original position in rational choice theory, the similarities between Rawls's original position and Kant's categorical imperative, the differences between Rawls's model and Scanlon's contractualism, and the role of the original position in the argument between Rawls and other views in political philosophy, including utilitarianism, feminism, and radicalism. This accessible volume will be a valuable resource for undergraduates, as well as advanced students and scholars of philosophy, game theory, economics, and the social and political sciences.Contents[pdf] [preview]Introduction [pdf] - Timothy Hinton1. Justice as Fairness, Utilitarianism, and Mixed Conceptions [pdf] - David O. Brink2. Rational Choice and the Original Position [pdf] - Gerald Gaus & John Thrasher3. The Strains of Commitment - Jeremy Waldron4. Our Talents, our Histories, Ourselves - John Christman5. Rawls and Dworkin on Hypothetical Reasoning - Matthew Clayton6. Feminist Receptions of the Original Position [abstract] - Amy R. Baehr7. G. A. Cohen's Critique of the Original Position - David Estlund8. Liberals, Radicals, and the Original Position - Timothy Hinton9. The Original Position and Scanlon's Contractualism - Joshua Cohen10. The "Kantian Roots" of the Original Position - Andrews Reath11. Stability and the Original Position from Theory to Political Liberalism - Paul Weithman12. The Original Position in The Law of Peoples - Gillian BrockTimothy Hinton is Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Professor Peter Niesen (University of Hamburg) has uploaded a new paper on Habermas's discourse ethics:"Discourse Ethics"(Forthcoming in Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy ed. by Jens Timmermann & Sacha Golob (Cambridge University Press).From the introduction:Discourse ethics in both its generic and specific sense is perhaps best understood by focusing on its most influential formulation, that of Jürgen Habermas, in its revised version in and after Between Facts and Norms. In this work, Habermas continues and transforms the early modern program of “moral philosophy”, leading up to Kant's Metaphysics of Morals and comprising politics, natural law, morality and personal virtue. Habermas's discourse theory attempts to formulate a general account of various complementary normative orders, based on a single discourse principle (D). Practical normativity then is specified along two dimensions, along the lines of the types of reasoning employed (pragmatic, ethical, moral) and along the lines of the practical and institutional contexts in which these processes of reasoning take place (informal, legal, political). Discourse ethics in its core sense is then assigned the study of the moral use of reason in informal, non-coercive contexts of interaction. In what follows, I first delineate how the idea of a discourse theory is introduced in Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1). Then turn to the distinction between moral and ethical discourses (2) before commenting on the discourse principle (D) as neutral between various types of normativity (3). I finally turn to its instantiation in a theory of morality, i.e. as a discourse “ethics” in the narrow sense (4).

Sunday, December 06, 2015

In "Boston Review" (December 1, 2015), Jonathan White reviews Jürgen Habermas's "The Lure of Technocracy" (Polity Press, 2014): The Riptide of Technocracy. Can there be a democratic EU?Excerpts"For Habermas, a straight choice between democracy and the EU must be refused. The losses incurred by renationalization—including losses to democracy itself—would simply be too great. “The national scope for action that has already been lost and is still shrinking can be made good only at the supranational level.” Only re-regulation “within an economic region of at least the size and importance of the Eurozone” can be effective in bringing market forces to heel. A more democratic order must proceed via, not in repudiation of, the interdependent condition in which Europe finds itself." (.....)"Habermas consistently emphasizes national institutions as the legitimizing pillar of transnational politics. Repeatedly we are told that nation-state democracy is an achievement that, even if insufficient to the demands of the global economy, must not be sacrificed in the building of a transnational order. Popular hostility for the EU is cast as rightful recognition of this fact: “the fear of a superstate mainly betrays the desire to hold on to the democratic substance guaranteed by one’s own nation-state.” A significant passage in the book is devoted to a constitutional thought-experiment intended to clarify the proper balance between national and supranational sources of authority. With the concept of a “double sovereign,” he evokes a compound image of the EU in which the national and the supranational are mutually supporting. (......)""For Habermas and the wider Frankfurt School, political philosophy is not about imagining a better world from first principles: it must always proceed from the ideas and practices of the existing order. Rather than reflect on abstract ideals, it must look for the logic that is already present, however imperfectly, in existing institutions and explore how they may be reformed to better express it. It is a deliberately non-utopian approach and reflects a conscious rejection of grand theorizing. Indeed, for all the skepticism of Streeck and others, it may signal too great a concession to realism."

Sunday, November 29, 2015

The relationship between "Global Constitutionalism” and Critical Theory is the subject of an international workshop organized by Mattias Kumm, Rainer Forst and Seyla Benhabib on December 11 in Berlin. Has the globalization of public law, that claims to be guided by basic commitments to human rights, democracy andthe rule of law, helped to realize the emancipatory potential of the constitutionalist tradition? Or has constitutionalist rhetoric merely legitimated new or helped to cover up old forms of repression? Furthermore, what role is there for legal scholarship that is critically guided by basic constitutionalist principles? As a practice that draws on the internal reflexivity of the law, to what extent might global constitutionalism serve as a framework for a critical theory of law?Program [pdf]:

Sunday, November 22, 2015

An English translation:"The Paris Attack And Its Aftermath"(Social Europe, November 26, 2015)Excerpt:I’m confident that the French nation will set an example as it did after the attack on Charlie Hebdo. There’s no need here for repulsing a fictive danger such as the looming “subjection” to an alien culture. The danger is much more concrete. Civil society must beware of sacrificing individual liberty, tolerance towards the diversity of life-styles and readiness to take on the perspective of the other – all these democratic virtues of an open society – on the altar of an imaginary stage of security that we cannot reach anyway. Given the fortified Front National that’s easier said than done. But there are good reasons over and above exhortations. The most important is staring us in the face: prejudice, mistrust and seclusion of Islam, fear of it and a preventive fight against it, are also down to sheer projection. For jihadi fundamentalism expresses itself in religious codes but it is no religion. Under other circumstances it could use any other religious language, indeed any other ideology to hand, that promises redemptive justice. The world’s great religions have roots going back a long way. On the other hand, jihadism is a thoroughly modern form of reaction to uprooted ways of life. Of course, a prophylactic pointer to the background of failed social integration or faltering social modernisation does not absolve the perpetrators of their personal guilt.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Robert Brandom has uploaded a new paper at Academia.edu:"Towards Reconciling Two Heroes: Habermas and Hegel"(Published in "Argumenta: The Journal of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy", 2015)Abstract:"I describe my engagement with Habermas’s ideas, and sketch way of reading ofHegel that I take to be consonant with the deepest lessons I have learned fromHabermas. I read Hegel as having a social, linguistic theory of normativity, andan exclusively retrospective conception of progress and the sense in which historyexhibits teleological normativity."

Sunday, October 25, 2015

James Strong, London School of Economics and Political Science, has uploaded an interesting paper:"Understanding Tony Blair’s failure to legitimize the Iraq War: A deliberative approach" [pdf]The paper was presented at a conference on "Failure and Denial in World Politics", London, October 17-18, 2015.AbstractTony Blair often gets the blame for the legitimacy deficit surrounding Britain’s war in Iraq. This article uses a conceptual framework derived from the social theory of Jürgen Habermas to gauge how far Blair deserves the criticism he gets. It considers how truth fully he made his case for war, how open he was to the widest possible public debate and whether he showed flexibility in the face of opposition. It follows Blair in treating legitimacy as an intersubjective sociological phenomenon rather than an abstract normative principle, but uses Habermasian thought to bridge the gap between the two. It finds Blair centrally culpable for the failure of his legitimization efforts. He tried too hard to be persuasive, and as a result presented his case for war in the wrong way. The way he tried to legitimize his war ensured it was illegitimate. It also made his arguments less persuasive in turn. This article both demonstrates exactly how and why Blair failed, and shows the value of a Habermasian approach.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a wealth of discussion and controversy about the idea of a ‘postnational’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ politics. But while there are many normative theories of cosmopolitanism, as well as some cosmopolitan theories of globalization, there has been little attempt to grapple systematically with fundamental questions of structure and action from a ‘cosmopolitan point of view.’ Drawing on Kant‘s cosmopolitan writings and Habermas‘s critical theory of society, Brian Milstein argues that, before we are members of nations or states, we are participants in a ‘commercium’ of global interaction who are able to negotiate for ourselves the terms on which we share the earth in common with one another. He marshals a broad range of literature from philosophy, sociology, and political science to show how the modern system of sovereign nation-states destructively constrains and distorts these relations of global interaction, leading to pathologies and crises in present-day world society

Contents

Preface - Nancy Fraser

Introduction: Idea for a Critical Theory Conceived with a Cosmopolitan Intention

Part I: Habermas’s Critical Theory of Society1. The Theory of Communicative Action2. The Postnational Constellation

Part II: Lifeworld and Commercium3. Kant, Commercium and the Cosmopolitan Problematic4. The ‘Boundaries’ of the Lifeworld5. Commercium Beyond Kant

Part III: The Demospathic State and the International System6. Systematic Approaches to International Relations7. Between Functionalism and Path-Dependence8. The Reifying Effects of Reciprocal Force

Part IV: The Tasks of a Critical Theory Conceived with a Cosmopolitan Intention9. Critique and Crisis in World Society

Brian Milstein is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2011, he received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York with a dissertation entitled "Commercium", for which he was awarded the Hannah Arendt Award in Politics.

"Frankfurt critical theorists have had much to say in the last two decades about globalization. Yet Brian Milstein's creative new book takes many of the debates at hand to new and higher intellectual levels. Offering creative rereadings of Kant and many other important cosmopolitan theorists, Milstein treads where many contemporary critical theorists have feared to tread: the harsh realities of our violence-prone international or interstate political system. This is an important contribution to international political and social theory." - William E. Scheuerman

"In his original and important contribution to the debate about cosmopolitanism, Brian Milstein uses Kant’s concept of “commercium” to reconstruct the many ways in which we already live in a globalized world. But one, as Milstein shows with great clarity, in which we have not yet found the legal and political forms for organizing this life in a justifiable way. This book shows the power of a critical theory that combines normative and sociological reflection. A great achievement." - Rainer Forst

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

In "The New York Review of Books" (October 22, 2015), Professor Jeremy Waldron reviews Jürgen Habermas's book "The Lure of Technocracy" (Polity Press, 2014):"The Vanishing Europe of Jürgen Habermas"Here are some excerpts from the review:Habermas is Europe’s most formidable political philosopher. (.....) He is one of our most important theorists of democracy but the democracy he calls for is “post-national democracy” (.....) He brings to his analysis of the EU an understanding of democracy that is deeper than that of most intellectuals. The Lure of Technocracy is a small book, but behind it loom large volumes of Habermas’s more abstract writings on the principles that inspire democratic procedures. Habermas’s philosophical writing is not the clearest in the history of political thought, and his ideas are convoluted and difficult. By contrast, his thoughts on Europe are incisive and direct. I suspect this makes them less interesting to those whose allegiance to the great man has something of the character of an esoteric cult, of which they are oracles. Outside the charmed circle, however, readers may be tempted to neglect Habermas’s philosophy altogether. That would be a pity, if only because his complex position on the EU and Greece is unintelligible apart from the depth of his commitments in democratic theory. (.....)

Habermas’s model begins with something that entranced Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau before him: the idea of self legislation or political autonomy.In a democracy, laws are supposed to have legitimacy because the people to whom they are addressed are also their authors.(.....)To this model of people making laws for themselves, Habermas adds three additional layers. First, he frames the democratic process by emphasizing “deliberation”. (.....) We make law for ourselves in the company of others - all others who are going to be obligated - and if we are to meet democratic standards we convince ourselves that a given set of laws is necessary, if it is, by listening respectfully to what others say about the interests and values of theirs that are at stake in the matter. (.....)A second layer concerns Habermas’s idea of rationality and values. When people talk to each other, they are not, as he conceives such conversation, just engaged in instrumental reasoning. They are presenting to each other everything that is important to them about the matters under discussion, including ultimate values and concerns that go way beyond the economic considerations that pervade technocratic thinking. (.....)The third thing that distinguishes Habermas’s model is an insistence that democratic deliberation may be understood entirely in terms of the processes that it involves. (....) What we see on nearly every page he has ever written is a commitment to the view that when we idealize democratic procedures - when we try to define “an ideal speech situation” for political deliberation that respects everyone as a potential contributor - our theory is to be built up out of nothing but procedural concerns. Habermas’s theory “attributes legitimizing force to the process of democratic opinionand will-formation itself.” The crucial questions for Habermas are: Who is included, who is not included? Who is being silenced or browbeaten? Whose interests are being allowed to distort the process of communication? Political legitimacy for Habermas comes from respectful and thorough answers to questions like these... (.....)If democracy is so important, then why not treat the undemocratic character of the EU as a ground for Euroskepticism? Why not scramble back to “the reliable shelter of the nation-state,” where at least something like democratic governance is available? (.....) The answer, for Habermas, is that particular nations no longer have the sort of control of their own destiny that would make this reversion worthwhile. “It is counterproductive,” he says, “to cling to the state-centered tradition of modern political thought.” (.....) Some of the passion behind his post-national vision is for the institutions of social justice and social welfare that have been fostered by national democracies. But that achievement now needs democratic stewardship at a global or at least a regional level. And he wants to strengthen, not weaken, that stewardship in Europe. “I do not see how a return to nation states that have to be run like big corporations in a global market can counter the tendency towards de-democratisation and growing social inequality,” he told The Guardian recently. (.....)In many respects, the US works as an exemplar for Habermas (.....). He takes the American experience as encouraging evidence that people, in a country of immigrants, can hold layered and incompletely integrated political identities. His well-known theory of constitutional patriotism explains the growth of a “we, the people” mentality as a nonethnic basis for American identity. A similar kind of patriotism is crucial for what Habermas has in mind for Europe. European constitutional patriotism, as he envisages it, will no doubt differ in some respects from the US version. It will look to principles that would be challenged by some powerful social and political forces in the US, principles such as "secularism, the priority of the state to the market, the primacy of social solidarity over “merit,”. . . rejection of the law of the stronger, and the commitment to peace as a result of the historical experience of loss". But the form is supposed to be the same: an identity organized around a constitution rather than around a particular ethnicity.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor received the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity at a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, September 29, 2015.See the speeches by director Jane McAuliffe, professor Jürgen Habermas (after 9 minutes) and professor Charles Taylor (after 38 minutes):See my previous post on the event here.

In an interview with "Deutsche Welle" in Washington, DC, Jürgen Habermas commented on the current refugee crisis in Europe:"The right to asylum is a human right and everyone who applies for political asylum should be treated fairly and, if appropriate, be taken in with all of the associated consequences," said Habermas. In Europe, the situation was overlooked until now, he added.It has long been necessary for Germany and France to develop a common European stance that leads to cooperation in refugee policies, according to Habermas. Though he has often been critical of the German government, he says he currently takes a positive view of Germany's approach: "For many years I haven't been as satisfied with the government in Germany as I have been since the end of September."See also the interview with Habermas in the German newspaper "Handelsblatt": "Dann sind wir verloren, dann ist Europa kaputt“.The German radio station "Das Erste" has a short interview with Habermas here.

Is democracy in crisis? On the one hand, it seems to be decaying under the leadership of political elites who make decisions behind closed doors. On the other hand, citizens are taking to the streets to firmly assert their political participation across the globe. Drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this collection examines the multiple transformations which both the practice and the idea of democracy are undergoing today. It starts by questioning whether there is a crisis of democracy, or if part of this crisis lies in the inadequacy of social and political theory to describe current challenges. Exploring a range of violent and non-violent forms of resistance, the book goes on to ask how these are related to the arts, what form of civility they require and whether they undermine the functioning of institutions. In the final section of the book, the contributors examine the normative foundations of democratic practices and institutions, especially with regard to the tension between human rights and democracy and the special character of democratic authority.

"My dissertation is an exegetical, reconstructive and critical project on Jürgen Habermas' recent account of the role of religion in the public sphere. It is an exegetical dissertation insofar as it interprets Habermas' account as presented in his article Religion in the Public Sphere. It is reconstructive since it develops an analysis of Habermas' previous works as well as his new thoughts related to the key concepts involved in his argument. Finally, it is critical because it offers as well, based on the previous exegesis and reconstruction, a critical perspective of some of the weakness and deficiencies of Habermas' account.
Among the potential philosophical contributions that I attempted to obtain with the development of my project I count, at least, the following. First, by developing a philosophical-political analysis of the relevance of religion, I hope to be able to problematize, from a Habermasian perspective, questions like (and related to) the following: Do my epistemic beliefs or attitudes toward religion condition my belonging to a democratic-political community? Second, my dissertation will offer an integral and systematic interpretation of Habermas' work hoping to provide solid basis to understand his recent approach on religion. Clearly, an integral interpretation is in a better position to assess, and produce, fair critiques of any philosophical perspective, in this case, Habermas' account of the role of religion in the public sphere. As a consequence, thirdly, I expect my dissertation to produce enough conceptual tools to develop a critique of Habermas' view. This critique, to be sure, will refer to the main conceptual foundations of Habermas' account. Nevertheless, it will also be especially applied to Habermas' argument on liberal eugenics and PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis); an argument that, in fact, he presents as a case in point for understanding the potential contribution of religious doctrines for public debates within a democratic society."

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor will share the prestigious $1.5 million John W. Kluge Prize 2015 for Achievement in the Study of Humanity awarded by the Library of Congress. See the press release from the Library of Congress here.Why AwardedJürgen Habermas is one the world's most important living philosophers. His contributions to philosophy and the social sciences have gained world-wide influence, and for a half-century he has acted as a public conscience of the German nation and Europe as a whole. Translated into more than 40 languages, his work has contributed to epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, democractic theory, jurisprudence and social theory. He has written and co-authored hundreds of books, articles, papers, speeches and chapters, and is widely read and cited both inside academia and beyond it.Charles Taylor is one of the most prominent, influential and powerful active philosophers on the world stage. Best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy and intellectual history, his work has received international acclaim and has influenced academia and the world at-large. Published in 20 languages, his writings link disparate academic disciplines and range from reflections on artificial intelligence to analyses of contemporary multicultural societies to the study of religion and what it means to live in a secular age.A ceremony will be held on September 29 in Washington.Among the previous prize winners are Leszek Kolakowski and Paul Ricoeur.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

"Leviathan: Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft" (vol. 43, no. 2, 2015) contains a new text by Jürgen Habermas:”Der Demos der Demokratie – eine Replik”Abstrabt"Fritz Scharpf assumes that national economic cultures and lifestyles within the European Monetary Union are too heterogeneous to allow a common democratic legislation on the basis of informal generalizable interests. Even if this were feasible, a democratically constituted Euro-Union is not even desirable. This variant of the well-known no-demos thesis relies implicitly on a political theory that the acceptance of democratic majority decisions is always dependent on an intact socially-inclusive implicite consensus of the citizens. The criticism is directed against both the philosophical presuppositions of this theory as well as against the application of the principle of the indisputable legal protection of cultural identities of unique national economic cultures. The common elements in a civil society which define its identity change not only as part of social evolution processes, they are formed by democratic involvement in civil societal processes of self-understanding. An expansion of the monetary union to a political union could stop the undemocratic connection of apparent nation-state sovereignty with the actually enforced technocratic compliance to market imperatives „without alternatives“. A return to national currencies, on the other hand, would mean resigning the progressingly political self-emasculation of policy to the globalized financial markets."Habermas's comments are a response to Fritz Scharpf's "Das Dilemma der supranationalen Demokratie in Europa" (Leviathan vol. 43 no. 1, 2015), where Scharpf criticized Habermas's article ”Warum der Ausbau der Europäischen Union zu einer supranationalen Demokratie nötig und wie er möglich ist” (Leviathan vol. 42 no. 4, 2014). [An English translation of Habermas's article is available here.] Scharpf is responding to Habermas's comments in the same issue of Leviathan: "Deliberative Demokratie in der europäischen Mehrebenenpolitik – eine zweite Replik".

Friday, July 10, 2015

Habermasby Kenneth Baynes(Routledge, August 2015)256 pagesDescriptionIn this introduction Kenneth Baynes engages with the full range of Habermas’s philosophical work, addressing his early arguments concerning the emergence of the public sphere and his initial attempt to reconstruct a critical theory of society in Knowledge and Human Interests. He then examines one of Habermas’s most influential works, The Theory of Communicative Action, including his controversial account of the rational interpretation of social action. Also covered is Habermas’s work on discourse ethics, political and legal theory, including his views on the relation between democracy and constitutionalism, and his arguments concerning human rights and cosmopolitanism. The final chapter assesses Habermas’s role as a polemical and prominent public intellectual and his criticism of postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in addition to his more recent writings on the relationship between religion and democracy.Contents1. Life and Works 2. Habermas’s Initial Attempts at a Critical Theory of Society 3. The Theory of Communicative Action: Habermas’s Model of a Critical Social Science 4. Habermas’s "Kantian Pragmatism" 5. Locating Discourse Morality 6. Democracy and the Rechtsstaat: Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms7. Deliberative Democracy, Public Reason, and Democracy Beyond the Nation-State 8. A "Sobered" Philosophy: Postmodernism, Postmetaphysical Thinking, and Postsecularism 9. ConclusionKenneth Baynes is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, USA. He is the author of "The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls and Habermas" (State University of New York Press, 1992) and co-editor (with Rene von Schomberg) of "Discourse and Democracy. Essays on Habermas's Between Facts and Norms" (State University of New York Press, 2002).Reviews"An exceptionally valuable introduction and guide to the career of Jürgen Habermas. Baynes links Habermas’s work to debates in recent American analytic philosophy, as well as to that of prominent European thinkers, whose significance Baynes clearly explains. This book will inform professional philosophical discussion, and also serve as an accessible and always reliable guide for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses." - Hugh Baxter, Boston University."Baynes' book is at once an up-to-date synthesis centered on the leitmotif of Kantian pragmatism, a summary of Habermas’s debates with major interlocutors in Continental and Analytic philosophy, a probing critique of his social and political theory, and a lucid, concise, and accessible introduction suitable for teaching. It is the most successful overview of Europe’s most prominent philosopher and social thinker now available." - Matthew Specter, Central Connecticut State University."Baynes really knows his Habermas and he writes clearly and fluidly. Accessible and sophisticated at the same time, scholar and undergraduate alike will find this book a worthwhile read." - Simone Chambers, University of Toronto.Other introductions to Habermas:James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)Lasse Thomassen - Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010)David Ingram - Habermas - Introduction and Analysis (Cornell University Press, 2010)

Monday, June 29, 2015

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 1Ed. by David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne & Steven Wall(Oxford University Press, 2015)336 pagesDescriptionThis is the inaugural volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy (OSPP). Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. Contents [preview]Introduction [preview] - Steven WallPart I. Democracy1. Justice, Political and Social - Philip Pettit 2. Voting and Causal Responsibility [video] - Geoffrey Brennan & Geoffrey Sayre-McCord Part II. Political Liberalism and Public Reason3. Political Liberalism: Its Motivations and Goals - Charles Larmore 4. Political Liberalism, Political Independence and Moral Authority [draft] - Dale Dorsey 5. Against Public Reason [paper] - David EnochPart III. Rights and Duties6. Territorial Rights: Justificatory Strategies [draft] - A. John Simmons7. Can Reductive Individualists Allow Defense Against Political Aggression? - Helen Frowe 8. Elbow Room for Rights - Eric Mack 9. Rights and Responsibilities - Jonathan Quong & Rebecca Stone 10. What is Wrongful Exploitation? [draft] - Thomas ChristianoPart IV. Method11. Value Freeness and Value Neutrality in the Analysis of Political Concepts - Ian Carter